YouTube Buys Fflick for Social-Sentiment Analysis in Videos

Google's
YouTube video-sharing division said it has acquired Fflick, which makes
sentiment-analysis software to gauge what users are saying about video content
on Facebook, Twitter and other social Websites.
Terms of the
deal were not disclosed.

One of YouTube's
fun features has been its ability to let users comment on and rate the millions
of videos on the Website. YouTube engineers can easily monitor what people say
on YouTube.com.

However, they
haven't been able to tap into the gestalt of the YouTube links included in the
"more than 400 tweets per minute" or the "150 years worth of
YouTube video" watched daily on Facebook, said YouTube Group Product Manager Shiva
Rajaraman.
Before joining
YouTube, Fflick,
whose Website offers no information beyond a message that it is taking what
users "love about Fflick to YouTube," was a movie recommendation
engine, according to Electronista.
YouTube hinted
that Fflick will gauge Twitter tweets and Facebook status updates to surface
relevant video content and the discussions that pop up around it.

"As part
of YouTube, the Fflick team will help us build features to connect you with the
great videos talked about all over the Web, and surface the best of those
conversations for you to participate in," Rajaraman said. He added that
YouTube will work with the Fflick team to offer more features to help users
discover new videos to watch.
However, as
Electronista noted, Fflick's technology would be well-suited to support
YouTube's forthcoming movie-rental project, which will include major commercial
movies sometime this year.
It's quite
possible Fflick's technology will be used the same way Netflix and Amazon Video
on Demand rate and recommend movies based on user preferences
At a higher
level, Fflick is another brick in the cobblestone street of social software
Google began building last year, when it acquired Slide, Jambool, Angstro,
SocialDeck and others.
Google is layering social software throughout the company's
Web services to staunch Facebook's strong user-engagement flow.
The buy also
comes one day after Google acquired SayNow, which provides voice-messaging,
one-on-one conversations and group calls to be integrated into applications for
Facebook and Twitter, as well as Android and iPhone.